68 and counting!

Update 9 April 2014 — 68 and counting!

The El Reno Survey has doubled the number of participants since our December update and now counts 68 registered contributors. This outstanding level of participation has yielded our project a huge and still growing trove of informational resources. We are pleased to recognize our contributors on a new page on this website showing the currentlist of survey participants shown in alphabetical order. We have included links for those participants with their own El Reno Storm websites and/or video and photo sites. This list will be updated periodically as new participants come forth and contribute to the survey.

Our team spent much of the winter compiling and analyzing the participants’ materials for our building project database while also increasing outreach efforts to both the chaser and academic research communities. We remotely presented a short Powerpoint show to the Texas Severe Storms Association annual meeting in early February. The following week, at ChaserCon in Denver, David Hoadley was the sole representative for our team while John Allen and Anton Seimon were snowed-in back in New York, unfortunately. However, thanks to the generous assistance of survey contributor Chris Novy, we were able to share a 12-minute narrated slide show to the ChaserCon audience and others far afield via a live stream (the live stream had some drop-outs, so we will post a better version online here on the project website.) Finally, in the first of several academic talks and conference appearances we expect to make this year, in early March Anton gave an invited presentation to the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the State University of New York at Albany .

Up until now, the emphasis of project activities has been on data collection and compilation. We will continue efforts to gain the participation of other El Reno chasers and make our database as complete as possible. As we move ahead into the new spring season, we will begin focusing attention on product generation. The coming months should see many results come forth from these efforts, with results posted here and announced periodically on social media. Two new web pages to be posted soon are a Frequently Asked Questions page, and Recommendations for improving storm chase documentation to serve scientific purposes. This is part of our vision to broaden the existing community of chasers informing science, and to encourage the adoption of a handful of easy-to-apply procedures that could improve the scientific value that can be derived by visual materials collected by chasers.

We thank our contributors for their respective contributions to this exciting project, and wish the storm chase community a safe and successful season out on the plains this spring.